Evaluation of medical data by medical professionals is a necessary and important process in medical care. Systems used by medical professionals must have the ability to accurately recall and present data from medical tests to medical evaluative professionals. These systems must also allow for long term storage of the data to allow comparison of differing data sets over time.
In some instances, evaluations are to be performed in a non-emergency time frame as no emergency exists. On other occasions, however, when an emergency condition exists, the data from medical tests must be evaluated quickly. In these emergency situations, if medical professionals are not immediately present, the medical data goes unread and unevaluated, delaying patient care.
Conventional paging systems retain messages to medical professionals that contain data that is old or redundant, causing the medical professional to spend valuable time clearing messages from the messaging system and possibly take action on exams that my have been processed by other radiologists, thereby creating an inefficiency.
There is a need to provide a method and apparatus to notify medical professionals, such as radiologists, that examination of medical data should commence when data is ready.
There is a further need to provide a method and apparatus to minimize time lag between preparation of medical data and evaluation by medical professionals so that patients receive immediate care.
There is a still further need to provide a method and system that will minimize the need for emergency examination readings that are not necessarily needed to be processed on an expedited basis.
There is also a need to provide a method and system that will discriminate between data types and subsequently allow notification of appropriate medical professionals based upon the data type required to be evaluated.
There is a further need to provide a method and system that has an intelligently designed messaging system such that messages that are beyond a certain age or wherein data has changed status during an intervening time interval, are retrieved by the system.